Friday bullets - August 20, 2021

I'll just jump right in tonight.

• This morning at 8am, I got to see the livestream of TM's turning green ceremony. This means that he has officially graduated from basic training. After the ceremony, they got to have their phones along with a three-day pass (but still on base). It was great to spend time talking with him. Monday he begins AIT (advanced individual training). I am so proud of him.
• Today was also D.'s last day working at the library. There was a small party for him, and he is going to miss working there. I am going to miss having my own personal librarian. A lot. 
• I will be back to driving to the library multiple times a week to either return things or collect things that have arrived and are on hold. No, it doesn't seem likely that I will be able to limit these trips to just one or two a week. The very first question I am asked by many people every morning is if I can look and see if any of their holds have arrived. When you average a book a day, you cannot wait for the next book to arrive because the horror of being without something to read is just too great. 
• I have made a list of everything I need to take care of before we begin school. It is a depressingly long list. None of the items are horribly time consuming; there is just so many of them. Beginning school might actually be a relief.
• So what did I do today, this person who has a three page long to do list? I sat in my comfy chair and finished the book that I can't tell you the title of because I'm not really supposed to have it. It doesn't actually release until the 24th. But when you have inside contacts with a library, sometimes personal librarians slip you new books as long as you get them back in time. It was a very good book and there was a time limit. I had no choice but to spend much of my afternoon reading it. For those of you who love mystery series set in Canadian provinces, I can tell you the newest one is very good. 
• Our dinner table discussion tonight veered from H. P. Lovecraft to the ongoing trauma that trying to bake a cake in a Nancy Drew video game caused my older children. We are many things, but I don't think dull is one of them.
• K. made a love chocolate mayonnaise cake for dessert tonight. He did it mostly himself, though Y. decided to keep an eye on him so he didn't mistake things such as salt for sugar and tablespoons for teaspoons. 
• A book on Ancient Roman recipes arrived at the library yesterday. In flipping through it, I am not terribly enthused about our Ancient Roman dinner. Very few of the recipes look appetizing. This would correlate with our feasts we had after studying Ancient Rome with our history co-op. Food-wise, they were never our favorite. 
• Based on comments and questions I've seen recently on various homeschooling groups, I am flabbergasted at how little some people seem to stop and think about what school and education is. Or maybe I'm flabbergasted at how little they understand homeschooling. (It's been around a while, I guess I just assume that people know a little about it.) I guess it explains why some people continue to exclaim that they don't know how I do it. Clearly, they think that when I say we homeschool, they immediately assume that I do with my children exactly what they do in school. Times whatever number I happen to have at that moment. I'm not sure how I would do that, either.
• I have also come across more than one person who has to stop and process the fact that we didn't start school on the same days the public schools around here did. It truly never seemed to occur to them that there might be some people who were not beholden to follow the great public school calendar.
• Tomorrow, D. and I head out to IKEA to get him the things on his list that he still needs for his dorm room. Between his schedule and mine, it was touch and go there for a moment as to whether our calendars would allow for this trip, but we managed to find a time. We are cutting it a bit close, since we leave on Wednesday.

And with that, I'm heading to bed. I will have to figure out what I am going to be reading, though. I always dislike moving on to a new book after reading a book I was totally engrossed in. You know, the one I can't tell you about.